Page 132
“What the fuck?” Rhodes demanded.
“You have zero survival instinct,” May told him.
“I have plenty of survival instinct!”
“You tried to pet a wild raccoon,” Sariah said.
“It was friendly!” he protested.
“It had rabies!” she shot back, talking louder over him.
“We don’t know that—”
“It was foaming at the mouth!”
I slowly turned toward Rhodes. When he caught me looking, he immediately pointed at Sariah like she was the unreasonable person in the story.
“What about the time you walked out onto the roof of that hotel in New York because you wanted a better look at a lightning storm?” Imogen chimed in.
“There was a railing,” Rhodes dismissed.
“There was not a railing,” Grady corrected all too pleasantly.
“The roof was flat!” he exclaimed.
“Oh! Oh!” Frankie slapped the table with excitement. “Do y’all remember the jellyfish?”
“That was different,” Rhodes shot back quickly. “That was for science.”
“You picked it up,” May replied.
“Rhodes!” I stared at him. I didn’t live near the ocean, and I even knew that was a dumb idea.
“It was washed up,” he told me, as if that made it any better. “I wanted to know what kind it was.”
“That doesn’t make it any better,” Sariah said.
“What about when he ate those berries he found when we went camping?” Billie contributed.
“I knew what they were,” Rhodes told me.
“No, you thought you knew what they were,” Sariah corrected.
“And I was right!”
“That’s not survival instinct. That’s just getting lucky,” she informed him with a smug smile.
“I have a degree in mathematical engineering,” he retorted. “I’d be fine.”
“Yes, because zombies care about math,” Romy said. I hid my face in my hand, laughter finally winning as the table dissolved around me. This man had helped build spaceships, but apparently, none of them trusted him to survive an unsupervised afternoon on Earth.
“You’re supposed to be on my side,” Rhodes murmured under his breath. I smiled. I couldn’t help it.
“I’m going to need all of these stories later,” I told him.
“No, you aren’t.”
“Yes, I am.” One way or another, I’d get the stories out of him. These little back-and-forths couldn’t be it. I needed more.
